One of the things many of us have forgotten is the “Zone System”, and I guess it is because of the prevalence of digital cameras where you can shoot many copies then choose … but here is a good, simple article that is worth following as Ansel Adams methodology is relevant today …
How to Use the Zone System in Photography | PetaPixel How to Use the Zone System in Photography | PetaPixel
With the dynamic range of digital cameras and DeNoise AI to tidy up the shadows it does seem to be less relevant. And we can easily bracket.
The Zone System only has relevance to film photography - great relevance but it has no relevance at all in digital photography.
You should try it, I guarantee you will start to take better photos.
Just as an example, when you using a camera with a built-in light meter. The light meter is calibrated to read middle grey, Zone V.
That means things like snow will appear grey unless you add a couple of stops of light.
Read the article, it’s really relevant and improves your skills if you practice it as you don’t have to rely on software.
I have read the article and it is all about film photography. I know you didn’t mean to sound patronising but I have been a photographer ‘trying it’ for over 40 years and have used both film and digital extensively. The principles of exposure for each medium are quite different.
Your example illustrates exposure compensation which has relevance to both film and digital exposure technique, but has nothing to do with how film vs digital exposure works. You cannot pre visualise with digital as you can with film or expose for a particular zone. Digital exposure is linear and is about collecting the maximum amount of data. Rearranging that data into a pleasing tonal scale comes later in post process. A film negative looks ‘right’ after development according to how it was exposed and developed. A correctly exposed digital negative often looks ‘wrong’ visually (too bright) and is then normalised in post process to look correct visually.
Thinking that the Zone System or using film exposure principles can be applied to digital exposure is a common misconception and a complete fallacy.
I didn’t mean to sound patronizing either and I have done the same since '75 … but I still use the zone system (habit I guess) because of limitations of metering. Anyway, for me anyway, it isn’t difficult and makes my results less reliant on software.
I’m a bit baffled by your answer. The meter is a simple tool which tries to make anything it is pointed at a 12-18% grey tone. It does what it does. It is ‘stupid’. It requires input from a human brain to direct this dumb tool to do something sensible. Using the Zone System is the context of digital exposure is, with respect, a long way from sensible. I don’t see how using an irrelevant technique because it isn’t difficult makes it a good reason to continue. And it doesn’t make one less reliant on software either - quite the contrary, underexposed files suffer increased noise and less detail while overexposed files have no data at all, and so make one more reliant on software to counter these errors, not less.
I am sorry, but with respect, the article you reference is both misguided and misleading for digital photographers. The Zone System is highly relevant only in film photography where placing tones in the appropriate place on the tonal scale determines how the image will look when output as a print. However, a film’s response to light is non-linear (as is the human eye’s) and corresponds to what is known as an S-shaped gamma/tone curve where the highest and lowest tones require progressively more exposure to produce an incremental increase in image brightness. A digital sensor behaves in a fundamentally different way. Digital exposure is linear with each stop of exposure producing a doubling of perceived brightness across the entire recordable tonal range – meaning that, unlike film, no tone curve is applied which in turn, means that each F-stop records half of the light of the previous one which in turn, means that the brightest stop (the one closest to the right side of the histogram) contains 50% of all the digital data in the file. The next stop down contains 25%…and so on…which in turn, means that if you do not use the right-hand fifth of the histogram you are in fact throwing away fully half of the available encoding values of your camera before you start. The exposure meter is an accurate, but very dumb instrument, essentially calibrated (from the days of film) to a mid-tone grey and takes no account of the fact that digital exposure is linear and, by extrapolation, that capturing as much data as is possible short of saturating the sensor is the only way to optimise digital exposure. It also gives the lie to those who persist in clinging to the old nonsense that the in-camera appearance of an image is, in some way, a personal, artistic or creative choice. It isn’t. It’s just throwing away valuable image data with all the penalties that accompany that choice. Optimal digital exposure is about maximising data capture. That means applying the greatest possible exposure to the sensor short of saturation/clipping. The histogram rules – and even that is misleading in that it reflects the in camera display JPEG exposure rather than the true RAW. The best RAW capture is ironically likely the one which looks utterly horrible in the camera LCD – both too bright and too flat.
There is no Zone System in RAW digital capture. The Zone System in digital photography belongs in the realm of post-processing. Once you have as much data as the sensor can capture, you can rearrange it (and thus the Zones of the tonal range) in the editing process to your heart’s content – to correspond to whatever visualisation you want. If you fail to capture all the data, you are effectively dealing with a file depleted of information with the accompanying penalties of a truncated tonal scale, reduced detail and increased in noise. It’s frustrating to read technical arguments about image quality between photographers who have, by exposing in the way you describe, unwittingly binned half their image data before they even get to look at their images. They then enter into lengthy discussions about how a particular piece of software can recover detail, noise, dynamic range and colour fidelity from images which, had they been exposed correctly in the first place, would have few, if any, of the defects they work so hard to correct. Control of the tonal range is a significant skill, but in digital photography, it’s an entirely different skill from the one required in the world of film.
